Whose Crimea is it anyway?

On 18 March, Vladimir Putin declared to the Russian parliament that Crimea had always been an inseparable part of Russia. But in fact the peninsula’s history is not so simple.

Putin’s speech marked the culmination
of Russia’s efforts to annex Crimea and outlined the historical basis for the
move. In a fervent nationalist appeal, Putin dismissed the transfer of Crimea
from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine in 1954 as the whim of a totalitarian
ruler, with tragic consequences for the peninsula’s ethnic Russians. But
Khrushchev’s decision to place Crimea under Ukrainian administration was a
calculated one – the area’s strong economic and administrative ties to Ukraine
were crucial for its postwar reconstruction. Moreover, although Crimea had become
part of Russia in the late 18th century, it was only in Soviet Ukraine that it
acquired the Russian identity that Putin is tapping into today.

Khrushchev’s decision to place Crimea under Ukrainian administration was a calculated one.

Putin claimed the transfer of
Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 was a mere formality. Before the collapse of the
USSR, he suggested, the Ukrainian administration had no impact on Crimea’s
political and cultural identity: ‘It was only when Crimea suddenly ended up in
a different country [in 1991] that Russia realised it had not been simply robbed,
but plundered.’ This view is, however, founded on a basic misunderstanding of the
USSR’s political structure. The Soviet Union was divided into fifteen ethnically
designated republics, and although Moscow had the deciding voice in most
matters, the republics had their own governments, budgets and communist
parties.

Sevastopol devastated by German bombardment. Crimea suffered greatly from the war. via German Federal Archive.This federal structure
distinguished the USSR from the old Tsarist Empire: contrary to popular perceptions, the leaders
of each republic retained a significant degree of cultural and linguistic
autonomy, and were able to promote non-Russians to administrative and political
posts. At the same time, xenophobia was rampant in the USSR after the
mid-1930s. Claiming that all ethnicities had the right to political
representation, Moscow in fact declared ethnic Russians as ‘first among
equals’ and targeted entire ethnic groups for repressions and deportations. In
Ukraine, this created tensions between Ukrainians and Russians, as members of
both ethnic groups made claims to political leadership in the republic. Whether
Crimea belonged to Soviet Russia or Soviet Ukraine was not without
significance.

Postwar reconstruction

Crimea was integrated into the
Ukrainian political and administrative system in 1954. To be sure, the transfer
of Crimea was an unsettling experience for the local elite. Party apparatchiks,
collective farm chairmen and factory directors suddenly faced a barrage of
letters from Kyiv, sometimes in the unfamiliar Ukrainian language, calling for
substantial restructuring of the local economy. But while local cadres were
indeed in flux (as was the case throughout the USSR in the 1950s), leaders in Kyiv
were reluctant to replace the predominantly Russian elite of Crimea with ethnic
Ukrainians.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of Ukrainian rule in Soviet Crimea was grounded in Kyiv’s ability to fix the economy.

Soon, the Crimean elites were
looking to Kyiv for funding and advice. Although Putin asserts that Crimea was
always close to ‘Russian hearts and minds,’ the peninsula had been neglected in
Soviet Russia before 1954. Badly damaged during the Second World War, it was
still in a sorry state when it joined Ukraine: hospitals destroyed during the
war had not been rebuilt; water shortages plagued collective farms and major
towns such as Sevastopol and Simferopol, while the beaches of Yalta were
covered in excrement for the want of sewage systems on the Crimean coast. In short, government institutions in Soviet Russia had little time for Crimea.

The Crimean town of Kerch in 1902. Post-war Crimea was very different from the Crimea of Imperial Russia. CC G. N. KarantaBut while
the Russian authorities, for example, shirked responsibility for restoring Crimean park
spaces that had played a crucial role in Tsarist-era natural sciences, Ukraine was keen to invest in their development. ‘The botanical gardens
near Yalta should be turned into a leading research institution for southern
Ukraine,’ argued scientists in Kyiv. Keen to redefine the cultural map of
Soviet Ukraine, Kyiv also opened up new opportunities for Crimean artists and
writers. For example, partly in order to appease the Soviet Ukrainian
intelligentsia that called for increased cultural autonomy after the death of
Stalin, the Ukrainian Government sponsored Ukrainian translations of
Russian-language works by Crimean authors.

Ultimately, however, the
legitimacy of Ukrainian rule in Soviet Crimea was grounded in Kyiv’s ability to
fix the economy. Immediately after the transfer, agricultural specialists from Kyiv
travelled south to revitalise ailing vineyards and orchards that had been
neglected since before the Second World War. Between 1954 and 1958, Kyiv planned to increase
the number of hospital beds in Crimea from 1600 to 2200. The money would come
mostly from the Ukrainian budget, with the Soviet central government covering
some 38% of the cost. But the locals were not always thrilled to be integrated
into Ukraine’s economy. Rumours spread in the 1950s that Kyiv would lower local
salaries and replace regional leaders with its own people. Just as in 2014,
many Crimeans in the 1950s perceived Ukraine as Russia’s poor cousin and
believed that they would be better off under Russian rule.

Crimea for the Slavs

The rebuilding of Crimea in the
1950s was not just a question of better management and money. Kyiv also needed
to establish a new culture for the peninsula. This is not to suggest that
Crimea was a cultural wasteland in 1954 – the peninsula had its own radio,
newspapers, and three Russian-language theatres. Still, Ukrainian leaders had
their hands full as Crimean culture had never completely recovered after the
war. The museum at the Vorontsov Palace in Alupka, where Winston Churchill
stayed during the Yalta conference in 1945, hadn’t reopened its doors after the
war. The Sevastopol art gallery had a full rota of staff but no building in
which to display its collections. As fear of crime grew in the early 1950s,
there was little to bind Crimean society together. The brutal deportation of
Crimean Tatars in 1944 had destroyed social networks (the Crimean Tatar
movement for the right to return was one of the most sustained forms of dissent
in the USSR, but they were not allowed back until the late 1980s). Meanwhile,
settlers unfamiliar with each other and the local environment, arrived fast. As
in other parts of the USSR, after the war and the death of Stalin, Soviet
leaders were desperate to prevent social disintegration in Crimea.

Nikita Khrushchev used Crimea to change the ethnic make-up of Ukraine and thereby undermine western Ukrainian nationalism.

Culturally, Crimea was a bad fit
in Soviet Ukraine. In 1954 ethnic Russians made up 75% of its population and
the Ukrainian language was hardly spoken at all. In fact, as the Harvard historian
Mark Kramer argues,
Nikita Khrushchev used Crimea to change the ethnic make-up of Ukraine and
thereby undermine the Ukrainian nationalism that plagued the USSR’s western
borderlands after the Second World War. Kyiv made only very cautious attempts to bring
Ukrainian culture to Crimea. A Ukrainian theatre opened in Simferopol, and
Ukrainian-language newspapers were flown in from Kyiv every morning for
Crimea’s ethnic Ukrainians; and a Ukrainian-language school opened in
Simferopol in 1957 to accommodate newly arrived ethnic Ukrainians.

1970s Soviet postcard from Crimea in Russian and Ukrainian. Local post-war identity was pan-Slavic and anti-Western.Even these modest measures evoked
some indignation among local inhabitants. Foreshadowing the concerns that many
Crimeans have voiced in 2014, some locals in the 1950s feared they would now
have to send their children to Ukrainian-language schools. ‘Why don’t we have a
referendum to decide whether Crimea should belong to Russia or Ukraine?’, asked
a resident in an anonymous note passed on to a local Communist Party
apparatchik. The locals felt out of place in Ukraine.

But the culture that emerged in
Crimea in the 1950s was not purely Russian. To define what it meant to be
Crimean, Ukrainian leaders promoted a peculiar form of East Slavic identity
grounded in imperial Russian history. Official propaganda celebrated the
transfer of Crimea as a manifestation of Russo-Ukrainian brotherhood dating
back to the medieval kingdom of Rus. Today, the same historical tropes are used
to justify Crimea’s transfer in the other direction.

At the same time, Soviet Crimea
was very different from the Tsarist Crimea of the 19th century. While
Alexander Pushkin’s poetry of the 1820s revelled in the exotic treasures of the
old Crimean Tatar capital of Bakhchisaray,
Soviet leaders emphasised the Slavonic character of the peninsula. The Khans’
palace in Bakhchisaray had served as a Crimean Tatar museum between 1900 and
1941 but housed no exhibition after the war. Party leaders, worried that its
beautiful architecture still made too much of an impression on Soviet tourists
passing through the town, instructed the palace’s curators to develop a new
exhibition to show off ‘the heroic Russian and Ukrainian resistance to
Tatar-Turkish occupiers.’

The Khans' Palace at Bakhchisaray, which stood as a monument to Russian resistance during the Soviet period. CC ChapultepecCrimean identity politics in the
1950s was in fact underpinned by a strong degree of xenophobia. Local leaders
even suggested changing the Tatar names of villages, rivers, and mountains that
sounded odd to the Russian and Ukrainian ear. The Slavonic identity of Crimea
was also distinctly anti-Western. Ukrainian actors and writers from Kyiv
travelled to the peninsula to celebrate East Slavonic efforts to protect Crimea
from the British, French and Germans, conflating the siege of Sevastopol during
the Crimean War of the 1850s with the Nazi occupation of the 1940s.

Putin’s mixed message

As Putin lays claim
to this Ukrainian territory, he veers between ethnic and multi-ethnic visions
of the ‘Russian World.’ Vowing to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers
in the near abroad, he also celebrates supposedly peaceful inter-ethnic
relations in the Russian Federation. Notwithstanding the impassioned rhetoric, it is crucial to remember that modern-day
Crimea and the many historical narratives that surround it are largely a
product of the 1950s. To justify their annexation of Crimea, Russian
politicians deliberately obscure its economic and administrative links to Ukraine, that could
form the basis of a cohesive civic identity on the peninsula. They draw instead on the Soviet
myths of Slavic brotherhood that allowed the cultivation of separate Russian
and Ukrainian national identities in the USSR, but were also used to foster
anti-Western sentiment, and to exclude non-Slavs from the imagined Crimean
community. Russian multiculturalism in Crimea and elsewhere is grounded in
imperial Russian history and the Soviet concept of ethnic Russians as the
‘first among equals.’ As a result, Crimea today risks becoming once more a neglected
province of the Russian Federation divided along ethnic lines.

About the author

Zbigniew Wojnowski is an Assistant Professor in History at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan.

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